WHEN MANY COUNTRIES IN WESTERN EUROPE ARE EXPERIENCING A flux or even a teeming confusion in their party systems, West Germany stands out as a case of almost aberrant cohesion. The ageold yearning for ‘the German synthesis’ finds its apparent modern fulfilment in the party system. The uncomfortable extremes of left and right have for long hovered around virtual electoral extinction, and the rise of new movements – such as forms of neo-Poujadism in Scandinavia or the rediscovery of the territorial dimension of politics as in Britain – has left the Federal Republic untouched. The two major contenders for power, the SPD and the CDU, dominate the electoral scene, and in so doing seem to be locked in an embrace from which neither is able to escape.

WHAT DOES THE EUROPEAN IDEA, THE IDEA OF EUROPEAN UNITY MEAN today? In the Christian era, a kind of unity was born of a common faith. It found expression in the Church and in the universities. It excluded neither ethnological diversity nor multiple and autonomous centres of power. From time to time, it enforced the truce of God, but it imposed neither lasting peace nor obedience to the same laws.

J-P. SARTRE HAS WRITTEN AT LENGTH ON THE QUESTION OF HOW THE myth of the French revolution is possible. The intelligibility, let alone the truth, of his answer need not detain us unduly. But the question is a good one. The past two centuries or so have indeed been the age of myth of the Revolution. As in philosophical logic, the definite article has distinctive and powerful implications and gives rise to very interesting problems. In this case, they are not merely logical, but also, and above all, moral, epistemic and political. The definite article seems to imply existence; and it also seems to imply uniqueness. Even more disturbingly, it seems to suggest, in this case, moral rightness and political authority. The Revolution is necessary, unique and inevitable, legitimate and authoritative. But to claim these traits, it must also be identifiable; and it can only be identified, hailed and revered, if it carries some manifest stigmata. But what are they? Can they not be counterfeited? Are there not peddlers of fake stigmata, or, worse still, of false theories concerning what constitutes the stigmata?

EVERY HUMANITARIAN ACTION TAKES PLACE WITHIN A POLITICAL context. This means that all humanitarian organizations, such as those which operate under the sign of the Red Cross, must devise a humanitarian policy which will be valid in the long term, based on a thorough analysis of the political context, the characteristic features of an epoch, the structures of political societies, the interaction of profound forces and the world political system. This humanitarian policy in its turn entails the development of a humanitarian strategy which is distinct from the tactical moves imposed by the diversity of situations and crises. Neglect of this work of reflection results in contradiction and confusion and, worse still, humanitarian activity can be degraded into a tool of politics.

GOVERNMENTAL DECISIONS AND NON DECISIONS AFFECT THE LIVES AND interests of their citizens. More so with the expansion of governments’ role in modern industrialized societies. In every society, therefore, the citizens have found it necessary to organize groups according to different membership criteria in order to defend and/or advance existing interests or simply to articulate emerging interests in the face of governmental resistance and/or societal opposition. Organized groups may compete among themselves not only in order to catch government's attention and favours but also in order to obtain a more favourable distribution of societal resources from each other.

THE MOMENT EUROPEAN POLICY BECAME AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT IN the external and internal policies of our countries, it could not ignore the use of the ‘Summit’, which in itself was an outcome of technological advance and of the personalization of power. The first meeting between the heads of government of the Six took place in 1957, in order to speed up the conclusion of the Treaty of Rome. Later, it was France which was most insistent that these meetings should be repeated. The reason behind this insistence was, broadly speaking, the nature of the French constitutional system and the osition of the President of the Republic, whose task it is to take t e main res onsibility for foreign affairs.

SPAIN IS A EUROPEAN COUNTRY, AT LEAST FROM A GEOGRAPHICAL point of view. Culturally and historically it is part of Western Europe. During most of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century it enjoyed constitutional government in one form or another. The liberal revolution of 1820 was the first outbreak of rebellion against the legitimist order imposed by the Holy Alliance in continental Europe. Men, institutions and parties of the Spanish Republic of 1931–36 were of European stature.

WHILE IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO MEASURE QUANTITATIVELY THE extent of corruption in any polity, it may well be that in an absolute sense it is more prevalent (although not necessarily more conspicuous) in ‘developing’ economies and polities, than in societies with relatively high standards of living. This, if it is so, results from a concatenation of politico-economic factors which fosters the spread of corrupt practices in virtually all dealings between the citizenry and the state. In what follows, we shall consider three forms of corruption – endemic, planned, and developmental – which, while analytically distinct, are not necessarily so legally or operationally. In everyday life they form a whole which will now be pulled apart. However, taken together these three forms may literally add up to ‘systemic’ corruption. This means simply that as a proportion of the total resources and talents available to an economy, those tied up in corruption are particularly high and alternatives in achieving individual or collective ends particularly few. These propositions must remain tentative, and instinct as much as hard measurement has informed them. Further, the trifold categorization of corruption used here is largely descriptive, and it is not my intention to undertake an exhaustive examination of causes nor to suggest remedies. However, a good deal will be said about effects.

THE SWISS AND THEIR POLITICS: THIS TOPIC HAS ALREADY BEEN AND still is of concern to many citizens as well as to social scientists. Although it has been the subject of several studies, it has however never generated any empirical research using opinion polls. This has now been done. This study is part of a series based on the results of an opinion poll – the first in Switzerland – carried out in the spring of 1972. The survey was designed to elicit the Swiss citizens’ image of the country's democratic system as well as their attitudes toward important issues. It consisted of a questionnaire lasting about one hour and it was given to 1,917 male and female voters selected by scientific methods which guarantee their representativeness.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SPANISH UNIVERSITIES AFTER THE CIVIL WAR put them under the control of Falange and the Catholic Church. The Ley de Ordenaciόn Universitaria (Law of University Organization) of 1943 established this Falangist/Catholic control over the recruitment of academic staff, the content of teaching and the appointment of Rectors. In 1940, a pre-war Falangist student union, the SEU (Sindicato Español Universitario) was converted into a state-controlled, single and (since 1943) compulsory student union, the officials of which were appointed by the government.

HAVING SPENT MORE THAN ONE THIRD OF A CENTURY IN THE TALL and narrow dungeon of Franco's authoritarian regime, Spain now stands on the threshold of an uncharted future. Not even those who say that the 35-odd million inhabitants mostly enjoyed the shade and the miasma can deny that the silhouette there for all to see is, unsurprisingly, that of a hesitant convalescent. Anxious questions concerning the future of Spain do not owe their acuity to the dread of what appears inevitable, but rather to the wide range of apparently equally probable alternatives.

DESPITE YEARS OF POLITICAL STABILITY AND RECENT ECONOMIC growth General Franco's dictatorship has left many of Spain's perennial political dilemmas unresolved. The problems that preci itated the Civil War (1936–39) and destroyed the Second Republic will continue, albeit in modified form, to dog Franco's successors.

One particularly intractable problem is posed by Spain's Basque and Catalan minorities. Local nationalist movements contributed to the Republic's collapse and remain a long-term threat to Spain's political stability. This essay, therefore, tries to identify the root causes of these movements; to examine the regional problem's present state and to scrutinize possible solutions to the problem in the post-Franco era.

IT IS REPORTED THAT WHEN ALVARO CUNHAL CAME OUT OF PRISON IN the late 1950s, he initiated a purge of the leadership of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). Their crime was apparently españolismo – or a sympathy with the broad reformist policy of ‘national reconciliation’ adopted by the Spanish Communists in 1956. The Spanish leaders were aware of this implied slur on their revolutionary seriousness, but as both parties battled for survival against repressive dictatorships, it was not an issue over which to break openly the fundamental solidarity between them. Yet a decade and a half later, with Cunhal seemingly leading his Party down the highroad to socialism and his Spanish comrades probably within sight of their immediate goal of the collapse of Francoism, the theoretical discrepancies have re-emerged. Santiago Carrillo, Secretary-General of the PCE, has been sufficiently critical of Cunhal's attempt to create an Eastern European-style socialism in Portugal to earn Soviet accusations of lack of solidarity. Carrillo has described Cunhal's policy during the last year as ‘a good example of how not to make a revolution’. In doing so, the Spanish leader has not only incurred the displeasure of Moscow, something which he has learned to live with since his stand against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, but also risked serious internal division inside his own party.

THE CONVERSATION (AS MICHAEL OAKESHOTT WOULD CALL IT) THAT is political theory finds itself these days starved for interlocutors. There are talkers aplenty, but they do little listening and pursue their several idioms not for the pleasure of language but in order to urge positions and promote interests. Philosophers like Rawls and Nozick join the conversation in order to demonstrate, thanks to the irrefutable logical foundations they presume to discover for justice, how most effectively to conclude it. Liberal sce tics like Karl Popper trust talk no more than philosophy, and opt for straightforward problem-solving. For Marxists, conversation can only obscure or reveal action – and action is where (as Marxism's American roponents might put it) the action is. In each of these modes of discourse, the goal is advocacy, certainty, justification – a resolution of, not a conversation about political issues. Moreover, as if the ranks of conversationalists were not already decimated, death has, in the last year or two, silenced the voices of three giants: John Plamenatz, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MEANING AND THE EFFECTS OF THE CONFERence on Security and Cooporation in Europe (CSCE) and its product, the Final Act signed at Helsinki in August 1975, are of sufficient variety to suit anybody's taste. Governments on both sides have hailed the Final Act as a great landmark, the opening of a new era of international relations in Europe based on high principle. Some of the same governments and their spokesmen, mainly on the Eastern side, have also called it the ineluctable result of the changed balance of forces in Europe; and among observers in the West who have agreed with that proposition some have argued that the Soviet Union has by Helsinki prepared the way for the domination or ‘Finlandization’ of the nations of Western Europe, and that the latter are too stupid or too complaisant or too scared to do anything about it. Then there are those in the West who feel neither satisfaction nor alarm but see the whole negotiation as much ado about nothing, changing neither the existing balance nor the outstanding differences.

DURING THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, SPANIARDS HAVE BEEN LED TO concentrate their attention on economic affairs. ‘Enrichissez-vous’ has been the cry of the government to all classes. World prosperity, a modicum of business freedom, some well-timed reforms, a great. deal of enterprising spirit have spelt economic success and an end to persistent underdevelopment.

The repression of political activities imposed a political and social consensus conducive to economic growth. However, the time is fast approaching when the enforced political moratorium will come to an end. Groups of varyin ideologies will contend for power. A backlog of problem will have to be attended to. In this article, while avoiding prophecy, I wish to evaluate the foreseeable effect of some of these variables on the Spanish economy after Franco disappears.

DESPITE ITS WIDE INFLUENCE, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF KARL POPPER has received, until recently, remarkably little systematic attention from academic political theorists. Hailed by Isaiah Berlin as the most formidable of Marxism's living critics and reviled by Marxists as a prominent luminary of that White Emigration whose pernicious influence is mainly responsible for the ideological rejuvenation of a moribund reactionary culture, canonized as a prophet of freedom and enterprise and lumped together with such despised conservatives as Oakeshott, Namier and Butterfield as one of those who want only ‘to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering’, Popper incontestably has been a storm centre of several major ideological controversies. Equally, Popper's dissident reinterpretations of the thought of Plato and Hegel, like his defence of value-freedom and methodological individualism in the social sciences, have generated massive and subtly ramified literatures, while the form of critical rationalism which has been developed by some of his disciples has been seen, both by its proponents and by its enemies, as the foremost contribution to the contemporary struggle against irrationalism.

THIS STUDY HAS BEEN WRITTEN DURING THE STAGE OF BROAD political transition inside the Spanish State, following the death of General Franco, in November 1975. The new monarch, Juan Carlos I, has already carried out some acts that will define Spanish politics in the near future, by confirming the men who governed during Franco's last years: but what attitude the political system will take under the monarchy is still unforeseeable; and, although everyone is waiting for a certain liberalization of the regime, the real scope that liberalization will have in the short and medium term remains problematical.